1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to a method and an apparatus for controlling output of a document associated with an electronically produced tab, bookmark or similar projecting object attached thereto when printing or displaying the document.
2. Description of the Related Art
Some conventional document processing systems using a personal computer, for instance, employ a technique of attaching electronically produced projecting tabs to a document based on a relationship established between document data and tab data, by the use of multi-window or other technology. Examples of such conventional techniques are disclosed in a paper titled "Beyond the Book Media: BookWindow" written by Okada and Matsushita (Journal of the Information Processing Society of Japan, March 1994, Vol. 35, No. 3) as well as in Japanese Patent Unexamined Publication No. Hei. 5-40594.
These conventional systems allow tabs to be attached to a document in such a way that they stick out from any side of the document boundary. A problem which exists in these systems is that a document furnished with projecting tabs may not properly be outputted on a printer or displayed on a screen.
As an example, if printer paper is set to the same size as the original document, the tabs attached to it do not fit into the paper size. In such case, projecting portions of the tabs will not be printed when the document is printed by the printer. When a tab is attached to the left or top edge of the document and the document is printed with its origin (or upper-left corner) aligned with the origin (or upper-left corner) of the printer paper according to common practice in printing, the projecting portion of the tab will not be printed even if a sufficiently large size of printer paper is used.
Another previous approach to furnishing a document with a commentary is to insert and print explanatory notes at the end of the document as shown in Microsoft WORD for Windows User's Guide of July 1994 ("Microsoft WORD for Windows" is a trademark for a word processing software product of Microsoft Corporation). This approach is associated with such a problem that the relationship between the explanatory notes and the body of the document is difficult to recognize.
Although there are known techniques of attaching tabs, bookmarks or similar projecting objects to a document as seen above, it has not been possible to print out the document in its complete form including the projecting portions of the attached objects. There has also been the possibility that the projecting portions of the objects attached to the document are not even displayed on the screen in certain cases.